consider matter as well as life; for the physical potency of that thing was long of building up; and this physical potency has its place in me. The material pathway of life is the pathway of my powers, and it stretches far back into cosmic happenings smaller or (it depends how you look at these high matters and what you see in them) greater still. We have no need to stretch imagination unaided; we may watch changes going on which indicate or, maybe, reproduce, stages in the creation of our own world and of its very elements. There are stars in which material elements are being either made or destroyed; it is hard for us to say which. In the constellation Argo there are two suns—furnaces of immeasurable heat—in which hydrogen, the lightest and simplest of our elements, is either being born or disintegrated before our eyes. There are other stars where hydrogen is in the same state as that in which we know it here, and more complex elements (for the elements of the chemist are in reality complex; they are only elements for him, because he cannot disintegrate them) are being born or, again, are being destroyed. There are stars in all stages up to the stage of our own sun and beyond, in age and powers; and there are elements of many degrees of complexity. In the series of those stars there is a series of changes which, taken together, mark for us either an ascent of matter from the immaterial, or a descent towards it. There is iron in its very infancy to be seen in some—proto-iron we call it—which we are able to produce ourselves by exposing ordinary iron to the intense heat of the electric vacuum spark and there disrupting it into a simpler mode which the spectroscope detects as it detects it in a star. We are entitled to say that in these changes material elements declare themselves to be things that somewhere and somehow are born and grow, whether in any one stage that we watch they are moving in one direction or another, from birth or down towards death. Indeed the most probable thing is that in the solar furnace-fires both movements are going on together; elements are being born and elements annulled. They have an origin, these elements. Some scientific men suggest to us that they issue from the universal ether that fills the interstellar spaces and the spaces of the stars themselves, of our own bodies, of all things in all worlds. Here the first stones of the pathway on which life travels may have (in their belief) been shaped. And neither chemist nor physicist can even guess at anything beyond. We stop here, as men of science only. It is at a place full of marvels that we are arrested. This ether is so marvellous that some rash men have deemed it competent to replace God. They have asked what need we have of any other God. And, truly, if the creations of worlds that are no more than physical were all a God was needed for, this amazing source of worlds would seem, not so unreasonably, to be enough. Whether the